Category: Medtech
Astek Diagnostics is one of two Blazer Winners, an overall award given to companies that have gone above and beyond in their journey to grow and make an impact.
Astek Diagnostics completed a $5 million capital raise in May to push toward commercialization of a treatment that would help doctors quickly diagnose two dangerous illnesses.
Astek Diagnostics is using the money from that round, led by Ayana Capital, to help support clinical trials and other research on a test for urinary tract infections and meningitis. The company partnered with MedStar Health, a Columbia-based health system, to conduct a urine test for urinary tract infections and with MRR Children’s Hospital in India for a meningitis test earlier this year.
Astek Diagnostics' product, the Jiddu, can give doctors a recommendation on an antibiotic to treat a UTI in just 50 minutes, compared to the several days it takes to see the results from a traditional bacteria culture.
Founder Mustafa Al-Adhami said the expansion into meningitis care is a way to help save more lives using technology that he is already applying to UTIs. The meningitis test uses spinal fluid to test for bacteria and diagnose the often hard-to-detect illness quickly. The illness is a bacterial infection that causes inflammation of the spinal cord and the area around the brain. Although rare in the United States, meningitis kills 33,377 people a year in India. Astek Diagnostics is headquartered in the University of Maryland, Baltimore BioPark.
Al-Adhami plans to request FDA approval for the UTI test next year. There is already a lot of interest in the solution. The company has $30 million in contracts from companies that want to purchase the test once it has a commercial launch, Al-Adhami said.
For Al-Adhami, this is a deeply personal project. A UTI-induced delirium caused his grandfather to break his hip after a fall. The doctors prolonged his relative's suffering because they gave him the wrong antibiotics since it was not possible to figure out what bacteria caused the infection. If Astek is successful, future patients in that situation could get proper treatment within hours instead of days.
“I can't wait until we get this into the hands of doctors,” Al-Adhami said.
